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HOW A 30'S STIFF BECAME A CHARMER FOR THE 90's

Published: June 10, 1990

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As it happens, Chester Gould delighted in technological advances of all kinds and liked nothing better than to upgrade Tracy's two-way wrist radio to a two-way wrist television. He loved the ''Voice-o-Graf,'' which made it possible to identify a recorded speaker by the patterns his voice left on a graph.

And he stuck to what he knew. If, during World War II, he allowed Dick Tracy to buy a landmark mansion for $4,200, this was primarily because Gould's daughter had taken interior designing at college and was keen on Frank Lloyd Wright.

Chester Gould Made It Move

Gould saw himself, quite rightly, as a narrator. His tales mostly came in at around 250 to 350 images. What with the drawing, the narration and the dialogue, he could keep the the story moving fast and far. Chicago in the early 1930's was his prime inspiration, and he didn't at all mind spelling out some of its more sinister manifestations.

Apart from his other merits, Chester Gould had the good sense never to let Dick Tracy get overexposed. When needed, he was there. Other times, he wasn't. Perhaps he was busy with paperwork? But even if God was in the details where Dick Tracy's paperwork was concerned, He sure kept his distance in the strips.

Gould also knew exactly how to work with the ratty, blue-collar look of a comic strip that fought for our attention on a crowded page. He didn't stint with ugly detail - the death by drowning in filth of the wartime tire bootlegger B. B. Eyes in 1942 is a prize example of that - but he knew that he had barely a square inch of newsprint in which to do it. He, too, was a workman's workman.

The luxurious, not to say opulent, technological apparatus of ''Dick Tracy'' the movie is at the farthest possible remove from Chester Gould. So is the presentation on film of Breathless Mahoney, whom Tracy watchers will remember from her first appearance in the strips in 1946.

A Breathless For the 90's

Tedious and unconvincing she was, too, in a story that presented her as a psychopathic thief who stabbed a man in the back with a pair of pruning shears and put Dick Tracy to sleep with a cup of coffee laced with rat poison. With Warren Beatty coming on as a displaced and potentially monogamous aristocrat, and Madonna as a maiden in distress straight out of the silent movies, Breathless Mahoney would have to have quite another character.

And she has, too, though it is not for me to spoil her surprises. Among other holdovers from Chester Gould, the 10-year-old orphaned boy - later known as Dick Tracy Jr. on the certificate of valor awarded him by the city police - comes on as a runaway from ''Nicholas Nickleby'' and looks the part to perfection. (Prosthetic headgear was not needed in his case.) Almost alone among the figures in the film, Dick Tracy's sweetheart, Tess Trueheart, portrayed by Glenne Headly, is played straight.With a gentle word, a speaking look and one of the most cheerless apartments ever recorded on screen, she has to make a deep impression.

Elsewhere, exaggeration is universal. Prostheticized heads look like luggage too bulky to be checked. The verbal riffs perpetrated with fantastic elan by Big Boy Caprice include a reference to Nietzsche that I shall remember for many a year. Shantytowns worthy of Calcutta are stamped into the mud. Echoes of St. Valentine's Eve in a bygone Chicago are turned into an artillery barrage.

Somewhere in all this, the original plain Dick Tracy is trying to do his original plain job. But just as the James Bond of the Bond books gets lost in the Bond movies, the gaunt, teeth-baring, square-jawed Tracy of the comic strips is somehow sweetened and civilized in the Tracy movie.

This is, after all, a Tracy that for a moment has tears in his eyes. What would Chester Gould have said to that? Would he have said: ''Dick Tracy is dead. Long live Dick Tracy!''? As to that, the voice of the people will be heard, for it is they, as much as Chester Gould, who made Tracy what he was. They voted with their dreams, and in a day or two they will have the chance to do it again.